“People say to me, ‘Oh, I wish I could paint.’ Well, you can. All you have to do is get some paint and get some canvases and just start painting,"

Rosemary "Rusty" Windham, here at a recent visit to the War Eagles Air Museum in Santa Teresa, recalls her "Rosie the Riveter" days. The B-17 bomber behind her, she said, "might be one I worked on during World War II."(Photo: Courtesy)

"Texas County" by Rosemary "Rusty" Windham is among works featured in the artist's first gallery exhibit, at Lundeen Inn of the Arts in Las Cruces.(Photo: Courtesy)

"Caribou Range" was inspired by views near a former home in Pocatello, Idaho. Artist Rosemary "Rusty" Windham has lived on Indian reservations throughout the American West and on an island in the North Pacific.(Photo: Courtesy)

"Schumacher's Crossing" by Rosemary "Rusty" Windham is among works featured in the artist's first gallery exhibit, at Lundeen Inn of the Arts in Las Cruces.(Photo: Courtesy)

If each painting seems to have a story, it could be because Rosemary “Rusty” Windham has a lot of amazing stories to tell.LAS CRUCES – Fields of bright, blue wildflowers surround a sprawling Texas farm scene. A pair of swans drift serenely between waterfalls. River rapids tumble over rocks and seem to come alive in landscape paintings inspired by an adventurous lifetime.

Windham, who turns 94 on Jan. 16, has created everything from original paintings to B-17 bombers during a long life that started with a dramatic debut.

“I was born in South Dakota in 1922, near the Rosebud Indian Reservation, during a blizzard. The doctor couldn’t get to the farm, so my father had to deliver me,” said Windham, the fourth of six children of Rosemary and John Coyle Windham.

Her resourceful dad also built a schoolhouse and hired a teacher.

Much of her childhood was filled what less intrepid souls could reasonably have called hardship, but she regarded as adventures. An oral history compiled by her daughter, Kathy Morrow, includes Windham’s first encounter with an electric light bulb at age 6 (“the most amazing thing I had ever seen”) and her family travels to survive a grasshopper plague, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

She was just 18, a recent high school graduate working in St. Paul, Minn., when she learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Sitting in her Las Cruces home, she talked about a shock that still seems fresh today.

“We’d never heard of Pearl Harbor,” said Windham, who promptly moved to California with a girlfriend, learned metallurgy and welding and became one of World War II’s “Rosie the Riveter” icons, helping to create B-17 bombers.

After the war, she moved back to South Dakota and met dashing young pilot Carlisle “Mike” Windham at a Lawrence Welk dance.

They married in 1947, started a family and began a well-traveled life together that included homes in California, Arizona, Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska and on an island in the North Pacific.

Mike’s career in law enforcement included stints as a deputy sheriff, duty with urban police departments and then as a criminal investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, organizing and training police on Arizona’s San Carlos Apache Reservation. He later worked on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, the land of the Ogallala Sioux, the Bannock-Shoshone Reservation in Idaho, the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska and Rota, in the Mariana Islands off Guam.

After her husband’s death, she moved to Las Cruces.

Through it all, Windham worked as a telephone operator, raised her daughters, helped rear more than 20 foster children and honed her skills as a self-taught artist.

“Mom had a natural ability to draw and paint. There were always art materials around the house and a painting was always in progress. She drew pen and ink sketches for a locally published paper in South Dakota and fashions for a department store,” said Morrow, also an artist.

Windham said she has always been interested in art but didn’t begin painting until she was in her 40s.

“I just saw some paintings at a show and thought I should try to paint. After my first painting, I decided ‘I don’t think I like watercolor,’” she said.

She framed the work and moved on and has since painted in oils with brushes and palate knives. She discovered she prefers landscapes and includes trees with distinctive personalities whenever possible.

“I like trees, but I was born on the prairie where there weren’t any trees, so any time I can include one, I do.”

She said she picked up tips from books and continued to experiment.

“People say to me, ‘Oh, I wish I could paint.’ Well, you can. All you have to do is get some paint and get some canvases and just start painting. You won’t like the first one, but don’t quit. Keep trying and finish it out,” Windham advises. “And get some turpentine and always keep your brushes clean.”

Loved ones have offered support and encouragement, she said, and most of her work has ended up on the walls of friends and relatives.

Until now.

Her first gallery show will continue through February at Lundeen Inn of the Arts, 618 S. Alameda Blvd.

It’s a joint exhibition with her daughter, well-known artist Kathy Windham Morrow, who has used her mom’s vintage palate knives, some of which are more than half a century old, to create landscapes of White Sands and the Organ Mountains.